Flag Fen: Life and Death of a Prehistoric Landscape [Paperback]

Francis Pryor is a very well known English archaeologist, who has spent much of his professional life excavating in the flat "fen" counties of East Anglia. He is an expert on the Bronze and Iron Ages, and has become somewhat of a celebrity from his appearances in the popular Channel 4 television series, "The Time Team".

Pryor is probably most well known for his excavation of the site, which is the subject of this book, Flag Fen. Abutting the modern city of Peterborough, the excavation at Flag Fen has revealed an ancient wooden causeway - stretching for almost a kilometer across what would have been until modern times fen country, flooded for most of the year - ending in a giant wooden platform. According to the dating of the wood, this construction dated from the Middle Bronze age (1300 BCE) and was maintained and added to for about 400 years; even after that time, there is evidence that it was still used almost up to the time that the Romans arrived in Britain at the beginning of the first millenium of the modern era.

Excavations at Flag fen went on for about 20 years, ending in 1995. During this time, Pryor established a successful visitors' center at the site, proceeds from which financed ongoing excavations. Pryor describes how he and his team tackled the problem of how to preserve something for visitors to see there. The problem is that, while ancient timbers are preserved under the covering of peat, clay and topsoil under which they have been buried over the years, they start to deteriorate irreversibly once they are exposed and dry out; they literally turn to dust.

Although the job of excavating Flag Fen is completed, Pryor is still actively involved in the job of figuring out just what Flag Fen is. This is the second "popular" book he has written on Flag Fen, and with remarkeable humility he describes in the current book how many of the things he wrote about it in the first one were totally wrong. In this book he manages to engage the reader with both the minutiae of wetland archaeology - aerial crop photographs, which reveal underlying soil structures, soil phosphate analysis for determining areas of ancient animal husbandry, dendrochronology for dating wood - as well as the "big picture". He believes that the "post alignment" was more than just a causeway across wetland separating two areas of higher "dry ground". In addition to this functional purpose, Pryor believes that the mass of artifacts - swords, spearheads, broaches and other items of personal adornment - valuable objects that were evidently deliberately desposited along the side of the causeway, clearly points to its use for religious ceremony and ritual. Good humoredly acknowledging archaeologists' habit of denoting anything they cannot explain as "cultic", he does build an impressive case for this interpretation.

Pryor is known for his resistance to conventional explanations of historical turning points; for example in his book "Britain BC", he sides with those who argue against the idea that adoption of mixed farming at the beginning of the neolithic age was accompanied by large scale movements of people carrying the new life-style with them. At each of such turning points he is much more likely to argue for gradual change and continuity with past practices. Similarly, in "Flag Fen" he argues that the important changes in early British society that characterised the transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages were "internally generated.. (not) the imposition of new Celtic ideas from outside."

I am not sure how this last assertion jives with the undoubted spread of Celtic language, whose relics we still see today in the "fringes" of Europe. But this is the attraction of reading Pryor; like everybody, his point of view colors his interpretations, and invites the reader to dialogue with him; but he has the honesty to openly acknowledge when new facts prove him wrong; and he knows that today's truth is tomorrow's fallacy. "In the final analysis", he concludes, "archaeology is a humanity and archaeologists are only too human". I don't think this does justice to the scientific methods, which modern archaeology uses - abundantly evident in the descriptions of the Flag Fen excavations - but it does display an attitude, which practitioners of many of the so-called "harder" sciences would do well to emulate.

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see the review  5.0 out of 5 stars